Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville (, 10 June 17467 May 1795), also called Fouquier-Tinville and nicknamed posthumously the Provider of the Guillotine was a French lawyer and accusateur public of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.
From March 1793 he served as the "public prosecutor" in Paris, demanding the execution of numerous accused individuals, including famous ones, like Marie-Antoinette, Danton or Robespierre and overseeing the sentencing of over two thousand of them to the guillotine. In April 1794, it was decreed to centralise the investigation of court records and to bring all the political suspects in France to the Revolutionary Tribunal to Paris. Following the events of the 10th Thermidor, he was arrested early August.
He was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal as one of the major figures responsible for the excesses and injustices that marked the period of the Reign of Terror. During his trial, he defended himself by stating, "It is not I who ought to be facing the tribunal, but the chiefs whose orders I have executed. I had only acted in the spirit of the laws passed by a Convention invested with all powers." Generally, his defense involved shifting the blame for the executions onto the Committee of Public Safety, especially on Maximilien de Robespierre.
Despite this defense, he was sentenced to death, alongside the judges and some jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal, among other charges, for abusing his authority and neglecting proper legal procedures during trials. He was guillotined in Paris on 7 May 1795, and became the last individual to be executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal before its abolition.
His precise role in the Reign of Terror is still a subject of debate; modern historians suggest that it is more valuable to view his role as part of a group of officials and various terrorist actors rather than solely as the sole instigator of the Judicial Terror.
Biography
Origins The Fouquier de Tinville family, now known as Fouquier d'Hérouel, descends from an old bourgeois family from the vicinity of Saint-Quentin, in the present-day department of Aisne. In the 18th century, Éloy Fouquier de Tinville, lord of Tinville, Hérouel, Auroir, and Foreste, was a farmer and a royal officer in Péronne.Famille Fouquier d'Hérouel, Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Le Simili-Nobiliaire-Français, éd. Sedopols, 2012, p. 326-327.
Early career
Antoine Fouquier de Tinville was born in Hérouel on 10 June 1746, and was baptized two days later (which often leads to confusion regarding his birthdate). He was the second of five siblings. His father, Éloy Fouquier de Tinville, a farmer and lord of Hérouel, gave him the name of the land of Tinville, while the name Hérouel went to his older brother, Pierre-Éloy. The two younger brothers received the names Foreste and Vauvillé. His mother, Marie-Louise Martine, came from a prosperous family. For six years he studied law in Noyon and in 1774 purchased a position as prosecutor or procureur attached to the Châtelet in Paris, which was an exceptional royal jurisdiction tasked with targeting, among other things, revolutionaries. He sold his office in 1781 to pay off his debts and became a clerk under the lieutenant-general of police.Paul R. Hanson, The A-Z of the French Revolution: Fouquier-Tinville, Scarecrow Press, 2007, pp. 134–134. In 1775 Fouquier-Tinville married Geneviève-Dorothée Saugnier, his cousin, with whom he would have five children (two twins). He was widowed seven years later. Four months after his wife's death, he remarried Henriette Jeanne Gérard d'Arcourt, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. They had three children together.Lenotre, p. 15-28
In early 1791 freedom of defence became the standard; any citizen was allowed to defend another.Journal des États généraux convoqués par Louis XVI, 28 septembre 1791Nicolas Derasse, "Les défenseurs officieux : une défense sans barreaux", Annales historiques de la Révolution française [Online], 350 | octobre-décembre 2007, Online since 01 January 2011, connection on 04 December 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ahrf/11230; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ahrf.11230 From the beginning, the authorities were concerned about this experiment's future. Derasse suggests it was a "collective suicide" by the lawyers in the Assembly.Derasse, N. (2012). WORDS AND LIBERTY: HOPES FOR LEGAL DEFENCE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. In: Quaderni Storici, 47 (141 (3)), p. 763. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43780153 In criminal cases, the expansion of the right gave priority to the spoken word.H.Leuwers (2012) Defence in writing. The end of the printed legal brief (France, 1788-1792)
Little is known of the part he played at the outbreak of the Revolution. According to himself, he was part of the National Guard at its formation.Lenotre, G. Madame Fouquier-Tinville, Romances of the French Revolution, 1908. p. 20 He was active in the political committee of his section in 1789. In September 1791 former "advocates" lost their title, their distinctive form of dress, their status, and their profession orders and adapted their practices to the new political and legal situation. Also Fouquier called himself "homme de loi". In Summer 1792, he supported the sans-culottes movement. On 25 August, backed by his cousin Camille Desmoulins, and after Robespierre refused the position, Fouquier de Tinville became for three months the foreman of a jury established to pass verdicts on the crimes of enemies of the people arrested after the Insurrection of 10 August 1792.
After Robespierre refused, Fouquier-Tinville was appointed as president. The Paris commune made the decision to permanently install the guillotine.
Public accuser
When the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was created by the National Convention on 10 March 1793, and Fauré refused, Fouquier was appointed on 15 March as public accuser, an office that he filled from the end of the month until 1 August 1794. According to all the testimonies, including those of his critics, Fouquier-Tinville is said to have been a very hardworking and conscientious man. The documents were sent by the Committee of General Security to the public accuser, who examined them, summarized the facts, grouped the grievances, quoted the incriminating words or writings, and mentioned the denials of the accused. In a word, he drew up his indictment.THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR:: OF THE TERROR:: ANTOINE QUENTIN FOUQUIER-TINVILLE TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF ALPHONSE J. DUNOYER BY A.W. EVANS WITH A PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE AND FOURTEEN OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS Fouquier was known for his radicalism. His zeal in prosecution earned him the nickname Purveyor to the Guillotine.Edwin Bannon, Refractory Men, Fanatical Women: Fidelity to Conscience During the French Revolution. Gracewing Publishing, 1992, pp. 101–104. On 29 July he accused Jacques-Bernard-Marie Montané, president of the tribunal, of being insufficiently radical. On 17 September the Law of Suspects was introduced. On 26 September 1793 Martial Herman was appointed as president and René-François Dumas as vice president; Coffinhal and Joachim Vilate were each appointed as one of the judges and jurors, Adrien Nicolas Gobeau as substitute of the public accuser
Fouquier lived at Rue Saint-Honoré but moved to Place Dauphine and then to :fr:Quai de l'Horloge both on Île de la Cité. An apartment between the towers of the Conciergerie was the home of Fouquier-Tinville. He lived there with his wife and twins while conducting the trials in the courtroom. His activity in the Conciergerie and the Palace of Justice earned him the reputation of one of the most sinister figures of the Revolution.de Gramont, Sanche, The French, Portrait of a People, Putnam's, New York, 1969, p. 122 His office as public accuser arguably reflected a need to display the appearance of legality during what was essentially political command, more than a need to establish actual guilt.
On 29 October 1793, Fouquier-Tinville sent a letter to the National Convention, which was later used during his trial. In the letter, he wrote: We are arrested by the formalities prescribed by the law. [...] Moreover, one wonders, why witnesses? The Convention, all of France, accuse those whose trial is being conducted; the evidence of their crimes is evident; everyone in their hearts is convinced that they are guilty; the tribunal can do nothing on its own, it is obliged to follow the law; it is up to the Convention to remove all the formalities that hinder its progress.
Early April 1794 Fouquier-Tinville asked the tribunal to order the Indulgents who "confused the hearing" and insulted "National Justice" to the guillotine. Claiming the Dantonists were not serving the people and were "false patriots", who had preferred personal and foreign interests to the welfare of the nation.Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel 5 April 1794 He did not align with any specific political movement, keeping his distance from factions such as the Jacobins, and he did not maintain any particular relationships with leaders from the Montagnards, such as Maximilien Robespierre, as reported by Antoine Boulant.
On 21 May 1794 the government decided that the Terror would be centralised, with almost all the tribunals in the provinces closed and all the trials held in Paris.The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny by Ian Davidson, p. xiv
On 10 June 1794, Georges Couthon introduced the Law of 22 Prairial, which radically simplified proceedings before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Defendants were deprived of legal counsel, witnesses could be dispensed with, and juries were instructed to decide cases on the basis of their moral conviction rather than formal rules of evidence.Derasse, N. (2012). "Words and Liberty: Hopes for Legal Defence during the French Revolution". Quaderni Storici, 47(141), p. 763.Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, 11 June 1794, p. 4. According to one deputy, if the law were adopted, "all we have to do is blow our brains out". Fouquier-Tinville expressed concern about the practical consequences of the legislation and wrote to Robespierre, but received no reply.
The law marked the beginning of the Grande Terreur. The Tribunal increasingly functioned as an instrument of repression, with acquittal and death becoming the only possible verdicts. The courtroom was enlarged to accommodate a growing number of defendants, and plans were even considered to place a guillotine inside the Palais de Justice, although executions continued elsewhere in Paris.Alphonse Dunoyer, Fouquier-Tinville, accusateur public, pp. 178, 181.
At the beginning of Thermidor Year II, Parisian prisons held more than 8,000 suspects. The number of death sentences rose sharply, and more than 2,400 people were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal during the final months of the Terror. Within three days, 156 prisoners were guillotined, including the members of the Parlement of Toulouse.Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, p. 119. The scale of the executions created serious problems for the city's cemeteries, leading to the excavation of new mass graves at Picpus Cemetery in July 1794.
Among the last groups prosecuted by Fouquier-Tinville were eight religious women, including seven former Carmelite nuns living in Paris. The indictment accused them of maintaining a centre of religious fanaticism and sheltering refractory priests and counter-revolutionaries. Fouquier-Tinville portrayed them as enemies of the Republic who sought to undermine the principles of liberty and equality.
Downfall
On 26–27 June, Robespierre demanded that Fouquier-Tinville, who had become involved in the trial of Catherine Théot, be replaced because he was considered too closely associated with the Committee of General Security.R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (1970), p. 368